Complex Numbers

Weird Barbaric Idiot Geek Dicks

Another scholarly linguistics article today... wait, did I say scholarly? I meant amusing, because it's from Cracked.

    5 Infamous Insults That Used to Mean Something Totally Different  

When picking a new insult to throw at someone, current comedic convention suggests you string together a series of random incongruous words. You type, “Yeah, like I’m going to take advice from a lopsided milk-stained piss plank.”

This works great when you're typing, because you have time to think and/or randomly choose the next word. Not so easy in person, but for that, there's always "Your mama."

5. A Geek Was a Carnival Worker Who Bit Heads Off Chickens

I'm old enough to, if not remember this definition, at least remember older people remembering this definition.

A geek worked at a carnival, in an act called a geek show. Some carnival performers exhibited impressive talents, and the freaks showed off strange physical features, but here’s what the geeks did: They bit the heads off of life animals.

Another expression that's lost its meaning is "copy editor."

“Geek” started to attain its current meaning in the 1980s.

Wrong. 1970s. A wrestler called Fred Blassie (among other monikers, but that one was actually based on his real name) had used the catchphrase "Pencil-necked geek," and he wrote a song called that in, like, '75. I'm pretty sure he was the main reason the meaning changed.

4. An Idiot Was Anyone But a Politician

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this sort of thing before.

An idiot was someone with an I.Q. less than 25, while other words described people that fell in other ranges — an imbecile scored between 25 and 50, while a moron managed between 50 and 75.

No matter what words we come up with to describe those of lower than standard intelligence, they will always, always morph into a general insult, requiring us to come up with new connotation-neutral words to describe them, which will inevitably morph into a general insult, ad infinitum.

But this is the interesting part (and it does seem to be at least partially true):

“Idiot” has deeper roots, however. It comes from the Greek idiotes, which described a private person... A private person wasn’t someone with a private personality but the opposite of a public figure. It meant a non-politician.

So, one of those cases where the word came to mean its opposite.

3. Dicks Were Older Than Penises

No real surprise here. Linguistically, anyway.

Naturally, Dick has been a name for many centuries, while “dick” has only meant penis since the 19th century. Less obviously, a dick meant a man since before it meant a penis. In the 16th century, the word just meant “guy,” and you’d call someone an odd dick just as you’d call them an odd fellow.

Really, just about any word can mean penis if you want it to, depending on context. Like geek, for example. "That woman only dates geeks," someone might say, to which a guy might respond, "She can try my geek."

Okay, maybe that doesn't always work.

2. A Barbarian Spoke Gibberish

Today, a barbarian is a specific type of warrior, capable of relentless rage and proficient with medium armor.

Depends on your preferred game system. I think it was D&D version 3.5 where a barbarian could actually add their wisdom modifier to Armor Class, thus negating the need for armor if you happened to have a decent Wis score. This, I think, was meant to explain how famous literary barbarians such as Conan and Red Sonja could wear a loincloth and a chain bikini (respectively) and still be decent in combat.

But yes, in D&D 5 and Pathfinder (a fork of D&D 3), barbarians can rock medium armor, such as hide or chain mail.

Before that, it was a word to levy at any of various peoples to dismiss them as savages. But let’s go even further back, to the Greeks, who originated the term. They used the word to describe anyone who didn’t speak Greek.

Many of the peoples called barbarians by the Greeks and, later, Romans, had a well-developed culture. The Norse, e.g.

The reason they came up with the word barbarian (or the root, barbaroi) was that people speaking anything but Greek sounded to them like they were just saying “ba-ba.” Barbarians were “blah blah” speakers.

And in earlier versions of D&D, they were generally illiterate. Which is also unrepresentative of actual barbarians.

1. ‘Weird’ Meant You Have the Power to Magically Control Fate

Being literate, I knew this. But it's still an interesting case study of how words change in meaning.

Originally, the word said nothing about the wrong kind of nonconformity but instead referred to the magical power to control fate.

The article provides examples.

Wyrd was an old Norse word meaning “fate,” and in its earliest English form, it was associated with the Fates from Greek mythology.

See? Barbarians can and do contribute to culture.